By Diana Diaz Canas

Before the invention of plastics, glass and paper were used to produce black and white photographic negatives. Glass plates with gelatin emulsion were produced from the late- nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century. The transparency of glass made the plates very Read more

By Christine Lee

The Harry Ransom Center announces the appointment of Eric Colleary as Cline Curator of Theater and Performing Arts. In this position, Colleary will oversee research, access, and interpretation of the Ransom Center’s theater and performing arts materials.

“This appointment signals the Ransom Center’s continued commitment to its already deep theater and performing arts collections, and we can look forward to the many ways Eric will engage students and scholars in the thoughtful exploration of these holdings,” said Ransom Center Director Steve Enniss.

Colleary is currently a visiting professor of performance studies and history in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. He holds a doctorate in Theater Historiography from the University of Minnesota. Previously, Colleary was an archivist and volunteer with the Tretter Collection of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota Libraries since 2009, where he organized the exhibition “Stonewall at 40: The Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement in America.” He currently serves on committees for the Theatre Library Association and the American Theatre Archives Project.

“The theater and performing arts collections at the Ransom Center are among the very best in the world,” said Colleary. “I am honored to be joining such a talented team, and I look forward to continuing to develop these collections and engaging with new audiences.”

The Ransom Center has extensive holdings of major American and British dramatists including David Hare, Lillian Hellman, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, and Tennessee Williams, among others. Within these archives are manuscripts, correspondence, notes, photographs, and performance programs and ephemera.

The performing arts collections contain materials documenting a wide variety of performance genres in the United Kingdom and America. The collections feature holdings in theater, dance, costume and scenic design, opera, and popular entertainments, such as the circus, vaudeville, minstrel shows, puppetry, and magic. The creative process, from concept and staging to publication and revival, constitutes the primary focus of these collections.

By Colin McLaughlin

Colin McLaughlin is a radio-television-film, rhetoric and writing, and Plan I Honors senior in Dr. Elon Lang’s “Drama in the Archives” course. In the class, students used resources at the Harry Ransom Center to better understand plays, texts, dramatists, cultures from which they are drawn, and the archival process itself. Below, McLaughlin shares his experience in the class.

You become accustomed to certain things after your tenth visit to the Ransom Center. The processes required for entry—presenting your ID card, dropping your backpack off in the locker, opening your computer —become automatic. What never becomes mundane is the experience of opening the folder, not knowing what you may discover inside.

I spent a lot of time with the Norman Bel Geddes concept pieces for the 1917 New York production of King Lear, both through class meetings and in my own time at the Ransom Center. These pieces represent some of Bel Geddes’s earliest work and are remarkable both because Bel Geddes was only 23 years old at the time and because the works have survived, despite the fact that the production they were commissioned for was never staged.

The almost abstract nature of the piece evokes the idea of a cultural subconscious and how—after centuries of productions and adaptations ranging from classic and minimal to bizarre (see the “King Lear: Godard Film” materials in Box 5 of the Thomas Fiske collection)—King Lear has transcended what can be normally preserved in photographs and film evidence.

I compared these pieces to the materials the Ransom Center holds on the Elia Kazan film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire for my final presentation in the “Drama in the Archives” class. I wanted to compare the photographic vs. non-photographic evidence in the archive. I was motivated by Matthew Reason’s words in Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Life Performance: “performance only exists in the moment of its creation, and its only valid afterlife is in the memory of those who were there.”

Comparing the abstract Bel Geddes work on Lear to the more concrete publicity kits and script revisions for the Streetcar film led me to argue that, because of photographic documentation and the prevalence of the Kazan film and its iconic performances, modern texts like A Streetcar Named Desire are more solidified in the cultural consciousness, and thus performances of these texts are more concerned with preserving those original visions. Meanwhile, because no photographic evidence exists for the original productions of Lear, the text is freer to be interpreted and adapted in bold, artistic ways.

My final argument, the culmination of a semester studying drama in the archives, ended up being much simpler than I had originally intended. This surprised me. After weeks of coming to the archive, I learned that the answers we find in the boxes and folders of the archive, while extensive and often enlightening, may not always be as complicated as we expect them to appear.

By Jennifer Tisdale

After discussing his own work in the Harry Ransom Center’s archives with students in his Humanities classes, Dr. Elon Lang realized that despite his students’ interest in what he suggested could be learned from archival materials, very few had actually visited the Ransom Center and even fewer had contemplated doing research here.

Lang made it his mission to design a course that would show how the Ransom Center could serve as a valuable and approachable research tool for all interested users—especially The University of Texas at Austin’s undergraduates—and to show how much students could gain from working with archival materials.

With these goals in mind, Lang developed “Drama in the Archives,” a Humanities Honors course he taught in fall 2014.

During the semester, Lang brought students from his class to the Ransom Center at least once per week to learn about the Center and to learn how to conduct original primary research in the Center’s theater and performing arts collections.

He chose important plays as the subject matter for the class partly because of the Ransom Center’s impressive collections and partly because the consequences of creative choices that can be revealed in an archive become clear very quickly when analyzing dramatic texts.

After several weeks of guided readings and archival work, Lang had students develop their own research projects that involved close attention to an item in the Ransom Center’s collections and its historical and critical contexts.

Below, undergraduates describe the research they conducted and the discoveries they made while working with collections at the Ransom Center. They show how, with creativity and a bit of support, they were able to create a singular experience for themselves at the Ransom Center that greatly enhanced their undergraduate education.